Candace Robb - The Cross Legged Knight

Emma was one of the few people who openly spoke of Lucie’s miscarriage, and did not dismiss it as God’s will as the older women tended to do.

Lucie pressed her friend’s hand in thanks. ‘Once Owen sets his mind to something, it is soon accomplished,’ she said. ‘I must hurry now — I promised Jasper sweet vinegar and barley sugar from the market.’

Only after she was out of sight of the Ferriby house did Lucie slow, worried about a deep, dull pain in her belly. She tried to distract herself from it by going over the conversations at Emma’s house, searching for what she had gleaned. In doing so she walked past Thursday Market and down Coney Street, remembering the vinegar and barley sugar only when she crossed into St Helen’s Square and passed a customer carrying a jar of physick. She was about to turn back, but thought better of it. She would send Jasper. He could do with an outing.

As Owen entered the palace garden, Brother Michaelo rose from a bench and joined him, his neat habit somehow shedding the leaves and dried blossoms that tried to cling to it. ‘I thought perhaps you would escort the Fitzbaldrics,’ said the monk.

‘With two of Wykeham’s men at hand they did not need me.’

‘Ah yes. The bishop has spread his men all about the city today. Four were dispatched to bring the Riverwoman and her patient here. The crone came — can you believe it?’

That Magda and Poins were already at the palace was an unwelcome piece of news. The suffering man should have been left in peace for a day or two. And Lucie would take it ill, Owen was sure of it, thinking he had urged such speed. ‘I did not expect them to be moved so soon. Who was in such haste?’

‘Our masters. They thought it best to have them here. May God watch over us.’ Michaelo crossed himself as he spoke the last words.

So be it. Owen had wanted Poins gone and so he was. Now he must make the best of it.

Michaelo flicked the hem of his robe away from a cat lying near the path. ‘That wanton prevented me from hearing what Guy and someone in the Pagnell livery were arguing about the other day.’

‘The cat did?’

‘I’d caught her moving her kittens to the porch behind His Grace’s quarters. They made such a fuss as I was carrying them back to the stables that they broke up the argument. Pity. It seemed quite heated.’

Owen smiled at the image of the fastidious monk carrying a litter of squealing kittens.

‘Ah. Here come the rest of His Grace’s guests,’ said Michaelo.

Following the monk’s gaze, Owen sighted the Fitzbaldrics and their maid approaching from the minster, flanked by Wykeham’s guards. Adeline carried the nosegay from the Dales’ garden, holding it at an awkward distance from her body, as if uncertain of its safety. Fitzbaldric still looked pathetic in his borrowed clothes. One of the guards carried a sack over his shoulder. The maid, pale and coughing, dragged behind all of them, carrying the cloth Julia Dale had urged on the Fitzbaldrics.

‘Before I meet with them,’ Owen said, ‘I want to see Magda and Poins.’

‘They are in the kitchen,’ Michaelo said. ‘A corner has been enclosed with screens. It should be warm, and the sound of the cook and her servants might cheer the invalid.’ He pressed his fingers to his temples. ‘How he must suffer. I do not know how he lies so quietly. Do you think he will survive?’

‘I pray that he does, at least long enough to tell us what happened last night.’

Michaelo studied Owen. ‘Do you think he murdered the charm weaver?’

‘I have no way of knowing that yet. I wish I did.’ Owen bowed to him. ‘I shall leave you to your guests.’

The morning’s clouds had burned away. The midday sun felt warm on Owen’s head and shoulders. Once he rounded the corner of the palace and slipped from observation, he paused, lifting his face to the radiance. If only it could burn away the scent of death on him. For several moments he stood there. When at last he opened his eyes the garden seemed bathed in a white light and as he moved into the shade of a linden he felt the sweat on his face cooling. There would not be many more days like this until spring, months away.

By the time Lucie returned to the shop there was a lull in customers, and a good thing it was, for only a few spoonfuls of the cough syrup remained. While Jasper was out at the market, Lucie assembled the other ingredients. The hocks seeds and flowers, the gum Arabic and dragagantum were all within easy reach on the bottom shelves in the shop and the storeroom, but the quince seeds, seldom used in physicks made while a customer waited, or asked for specifically, were stored on a high shelf.

Lucie hesitated — she had been fetching quince seeds when she fell. As if the memory were not enough, the cramp in her belly worsened. She rested on a stool, passed a few moments talking to a customer who bustled in — needing a toothache remedy, thank goodness. When the customer was gone, Lucie resolved that she would not spend the rest of her life fearing to climb to a high shelf. She was doing to herself what she had accused Owen of doing — assuming that once she’d had a fall, it would happen again and again.

Positioning the small ladder, she gathered her skirts and climbed, with more caution than usual and with her breath held all the way. The jar was large and smooth, and she would need both hands to lift it from the shelf. She must let go her skirts and her grasp on the shelves in order to pull out the jar. Taking a deep breath, she reached for it. Her hands were clammy, slippery on the glazed pottery, but she clutched it tightly to her side, freeing the hand that must keep her skirts from underfoot, and backed down the ladder.

Weak with relief and bent over with the cramp, she almost wept. But Jasper appeared just outside the shop door, greeting a neighbour. Catching her breath, Lucie set the jar on the counter and calmed herself by measuring out the seeds.

The kitchen sat between the two palace halls, Thoresby’s and the more public great hall. Behind it, screened from the archbishop’s chapel and the minster by a juniper hedge, a large oven rose out of a patch of packed earth, squat and blackened from years of baking for archbishops of York. That is where Owen found Maeve, the archbishop’s cook, bent over a tray of fresh bread.

She greeted Owen with a broad grin. ‘More mouths to feed.’ She straightened with a sigh of contentment, wiping her large hands on her apron. ‘I have made pandemain for the injured one. Easy to chew.’

‘I hope he wakes to relish it. He will not have such a treat again, I warrant. No one makes bread so light as yours.’

‘The Riverwoman tells me the poor man has said nothing, though he looked about him when they carried him in.’

Owen was glad to hear that Poins had at least awakened.

‘How fares Mistress Wilton?’ Maeve asked.

‘No better nor worse than you might expect.’

Maeve clucked in sympathy. ‘Tell me, what is Mistress Fitzbaldric like?’

‘No more demanding than Brother Michaelo, I promise you.’

Maeve laughed. ‘Go on, then, Captain. I must not keep you. Bishop William is within.’ She gestured towards the kitchen.

‘The Bishop of Winchester is here? In the kitchen?’

She nodded, then leaned towards him with a conspiratorial expression. ‘Discussing the treatment of burns and the severing of limbs. I preferred the autumn afternoon.’ She fanned her ruddy face. ‘Maggots and butchering knives — such talk does not belong in a kitchen. But I shall enjoy the Riverwoman’s company.’ She eyed him up and down. ‘You look hungry.’

‘I am. And thirsty. But I have no time — ’

‘You have time for a cup of ale and a meat pasty, you will not gainsay me.’ She nodded to a bench where a tray covered with a cloth had the inviting shape of the items she had mentioned. ‘I brought it out for myself, but now I’ve no appetite. Talk to me for a moment while you eat. You will not digest a thing if you eat it in there.’ She rolled her eyes towards the kitchen.